Introduction
In Scythian Warfare the mounted warriors had one or several amongst
their number who rode backwards and naked, painted black from head
to foot. He or they would carry a pigs bladder on a pole. These men
would ride headlong, so to speak, into the opposing ranks and select
individuals whom they would beat across the head with the bladder.

As they rode back to their own ranks they grimaced at the enemy and
poked out their tongues. The enemy often viewed this behavior with
a degree of considerable alarm, borne in response to a belief system
which was commonly held by both sides, even when one side was Roman.
This practice has been named "counting the Kou" (possibly also
related to the Persian kuh: Mountain, perhaps as a sacred hill,
place of the gods and hence ka; the spirit, double etc.) and was a
method employed to select the most useful spirits for captivation
after death, which must have been a terrifying prospect.

Not only was it likely that one would die horribly anyway, that
being the nature of classical warfare, especially against the Lords
of Death, the vampiric, cannibalistic Scythians, but if one were
selected (Valkyrie comes from the word ’to select’) ones soul, post
mortem, was destined to become either the food of savage gods or the
slave of foreign chieftains.

The poking of the tongue, also seen in medieval pictures of demons
(probably inspired by these Dragon Warriors) who select capture and
condemn the souls of the damned, is related directly to the symbol
of the tongue as the lingham, the utterer of the Word of Law, Fate
and the Pneuma or Spirit, the Ka.

These black warriors were probably the counterparts of the black
Morrighans or Bruidhinas, the female judge-bards whose word was law,
whose "spells’ were ’Fatal’ in the proper sense. To be struck by one
of these meant certain damnation after life with no chance of
avoiding the inevitable.

In a sense these warriors were male Valkyries, the dark
Repha’im
who, like the Morganas, did a bit of moonlighting (literally!) and
doubled up as Swan Knights on their days off. The tongue pointed at
one intimated that the act of ones selection was inevitable and
irreversible, and meant also that your enemy, by doing this and thus
"revealing his spirit" his Kou or Ka, after taking your own,
considered you to be no threat at all. Is it any wonder that the
church drew upon such images to populate their demonologies?

It seems entirely appropriate to model the fiends of the pit (OFr.
Kou) ofHell upon such terrifying characters who claimed to be able
to take the fallen warrior’s very soul, having first tortured the
body briefly but nevertheless unspeakably in life, on a field of
battle that must have seemed to the observer to be the opening up of
Hades itself.

It was in such battle conditions that the entire Roman Ninth Legion,
after crossing the Antonine Wall were utterly defeated, eaten and
one suspects, spiritually enslaved by the Pictish Scythians of
Caledonia. Not one Roman escaped the carnage.

Related to the word Ankh are; Anjou, Angouleme, Anschau, Ankou. The
cult of the Ankou or Ankh: Consonant migration - This can take place
with the change in phonetic accentuation, regional pronunciation,
changes in fashion, the vocalization of the words by non-native
speakers and the copying of manuscripts by foreign scholars or the
scribes of subsequent generation.

In this case it appears that the original word Ankh has developed
into Anjou via a linguistic path influenced by Goidelic. Spelt
’Ankh’ the H in Gaelic would have become aspirant which would have
been pronounced Ank-Huh or Ankuh. Verbally the K became mistaken for
a hard G, giving Anguh. In due course the G became non-Goidelic and
soft, as in ’germ’ and, with the emergence of the letter J as a
softer variant of the soft G, the Word Ankh, via
Ankhu, Ankou and
Angou (as in Angouleme) became Anjou.

The cult of the Ankou in Brittany and Anjou, the cult of the
Spirit
of the An, derivatively therefore the cult of the Dragon’s Breath,
prior to its introduction to the continent, is asserted to have been
of immediate British origin, although it was strongly represented in
the Island now known as Ireland in pre-christian times, where it was
probably originally introduced first by the Egyptian Princess Scota,
the wife of the governor (or king) of the Red Sea nome, Niall of
Scythia (see charts).

It is said that it was introduced into Brittany during one of the
migrations from Albany in the first millennium AD. Described as a
cult of the dead, the rites and symbols associated with the
characters who were claimed or appear to be its royal priests and
priestesses reveal that it was also a cult of blood and death, as
well as ancestor veneration. In lowlandScotland the spoken tongue
was Northern Cymric and in this language ’angev’, it is said, is one
of the words used to describe death, possibly suggesting
’going to
the Dragon’, the Church’s ’Devil’.

It is significant linguistically because the later house of
Plantagenet were called the Angevin Kings,
emphasizing, along with
the name Angouleme, the consonant migration described above and
adding some veracity to the Angevin claim that they were descended
from the Devil.

"We who came from the devil must needs go back to
the Devil. Do not deprive us of our heritage, we cannot help acting
like devils"

- Richard Coeur de Lyon.

Or, as the Monkish sponsor of
the Knight Templars, St. Bernard of Clairvaux put it when describing
the Angevins - "De Diabolo Venit Et Ad Diabolum Ibit".

The syllable Ang in Angev is also to be found in Angel and derives
from the Greek aggelos - aggelos which is reminiscent of
Agg or Ygg,
the Odin priest as an angel, a Repha’im or priest of
Nergal. Freja,
as a goddess of the Earth and the underworld, was the proud owner of
a Heron or Crane-skin bag and a Merlin feathered cloak which
Odin
was oft wont to cadge from her from time to time, making him a
Merlin figure and linking her to the sacred and sinister bird of the
druids. One of the explanations for the name of the Fir Bolg was
"Bag Men". Related to the Crane-Skin Bag, the Fir Bolg are Merlins
or Druids and thus Fir ’Bog’, "Men of God"

The Merlin itself was described as a "bird without a nest", a
solitary wanderer in exactly the same sense as was the magical boar,
"Le Solitaire". The boar as the ’The Hermit’, the solitary
archdruid,
the lonely wanderer, is the Merlin who likewise ranges alone, thus
indicating that Merlins, Odins and Archdruids were synonymous.

On the island of Delos the dance of the labyrinth was called
Geranos,
the "dance of the Crane" and is suggestive of the druidic ritual of
’Crane pointing’ as a form of related magical observance. The Crane
dance, known in Britain as the "Dance of Troy", was also performed
by the Ostiak peoples of Siberia up until the 18th century and was
so-called because they wore Crane skin clothing for the occasion.

Principally the Ankh or Ankou in Brittany was described as being a
collateral cult of the Morrighan which was particularly prominent in
the Breton coastal regions. As such this would suggest that the
Ankou had some influence upon the Armorican cult of the
Ferryman of
the Dead, particularly as Morgana herself is associated with the
Swan Barge of Avallon, which transported the dead Mordred to his
final resting place in the sacred grove.

In Eire the Cult of Ankou was associated with
Sidhemounds, Raths,
hills and Barrows, and hence labyrinths. Known as Mari in the Basque
region and associated with the Morias or fates,
Ankou was the
original model for the Black Madonnas there. The goddess
Ankou,
Black Annis, was derived from the Greek ’Anku-Kis’ who was a form of
the earlier Egyptian Goddess of the underworld - Anu Ket. In the
Semitic-Ugaritic texts found in Ras Shamra in 1928, Ankou is called
Anat, a witch goddess and regeneratrix who shape-shifted into the
form of the Morrighan or Morgana, a black predatory bird.

We are here in the presence of ’An’ the ancient Dragon Mother who is
both a sustainer and a reaper, a phoenix figure whose Raven like
attributes link her to the Kershalyi and Locolico of the first
dragon homeland of Transylvania. In Breton churches her priestess
Morgana is portrayed as a wouivre or double-tailed mermaid or
dragoness and in this respect she is identical with another
Priestess, Ygraine.

The Cult of the Ankh or Ankou was the Court of the Dragon of
Ankh-fn-Khonsu and his successor Sobekhnefru, whose most sacred
inner symbol, historically, was the winged Orobouros with a pendant
Greek cross; the Ankh of Nin-Kursag or Hathor, and her daughter
Innana or Venus. In tracing the history of one, via Egypt to its
ancient Sumerian roots, we inevitably therefore recount the story of
the other. They are, therefore, the same thing and represent The
realm of the Dead (or more pertinently, precisely and poetically
"The Undead"):

Tir N’an Og

Elysium

Drakenberg

Lothlorien

The
Court of the Kingdom of Elphame

The Grove of the Swan Maidens

Hall of the Dragon
Lords of the Rings,

Repha’im or Rapha Elohim, named after
Raphael who, in the Koran is the reaper and summoner of the dead and
corresponds to Waite’s Tarot card ’Judgement’

Later on, following Ygraine, the fairy Melusine of Anjou who
descended from her, was also portrayed in this manner as a wouivre,
especially and also in medieval religious architecture. Related to
this theme, in the cathedral of Le Mans on the Anjou-Maine border
near Rennes, there is a carving of two serpent tailed doves, called
Serpilions and derived from the Persian ’Smenda’. Another
representation of the Dragon is the serpent necked Swan.

The dove is sacred to Venus and is particularly
associated with the Virgin Mary Magdalene, whose name ’Magdala’ means the
place of
doves, e.g. the temple of the cult of Hathor or Venus - Ishtar. In
Albany the ’place of doves’ was Camlann or Camelot and the
association with Morgana and Melusine and the
Ladies of Avallon, and
thus the priestesses of the cult of the Ankh (of Hathor or Venus),
is apparent.

The Ankh of Hathor, according to Gettings, is generally believed to
be the source for the astrological symbol of her daughter Inanna or
Venus, whose magical colour is that of Elphame. Further to which,
Emma Jung reminds us that when the Grail appears as a ’stone’, it is
presented on a green silk cloth, which reasserts the link between
the stone and the emerald of Venus.

The colour green in alchemy is the Benedicta Viriditas, the colour
of the Holy Spirit or Sophia, the wisdom gained by the hero who, on
completing the "quest for the Holy Grail", is awarded the
Green
Cloak or Greenmantle. Green Stags (The Robin Hoods) are one of the
Grail badges or totems of the lords of the forest which entered
heraldry in the armorial achivements of some families. The Green Stag
amongst other things represents the transcendent king, the fairy
lord of the forest, blessed of a fairy queen. Stags drinking from
Grail Chalices are quite common subjects for bas relief sculpture.

The links to Green as the Elven Colour are obvious and indicate

a)
that the Holy Spirit is immanent within Nature or the Cosmos, i.e
that the universe and god are One Being and

b) that the Fairies
already possess the Holy Spirit of God by virtue of blood and birth,
not through the consent of some priest.

Therefore they are naturally
eternal beings and in no need of forgiveness of sin, because they,
the sons of the Repha’im as the true Children of God, don’t and
can’t commit any sin.

The Key of LifeIt can be asserted that the fairy or dragon cult of the
Goddess Ankou, although not originating there was, in any event, maintained
in Albany, where Morgana was born and was ritually active. Having
established this it is likely that the later kingdom of Anjou,
formerly known as Pictavia, derived its name from a priest or
priestess or court of the Ankh which settled there from the Breton
coast.

If this was Melusine, the founder of the Pictavian House of Anjou,
then Melusine would have been known as ’Melusine d’Ankou’
or ’Melusine of the cult of the Ankh’ prior to moving to there. That in
itself is almost certain, as it would be for the other Avallonian
princesses, but the idea that she actually founded the kingdom
itself is not, as the realm of the Anjou, as stated, was passed down
by inheritance it seems, from the reigning Vere Tigherna ’Vortigern’
to the grandson of MerlinEmrys III; Guy de Marys, who was already a
prominent figure in Breton legend.

Guy de Marys, reputedly a Vere ancestor, was also know as
Kai, Cai
or Kay, the latter spelling meaning both Quay and
Key, in relation
to which the Ankh was called both the Key of the Nile and the
Key of
Life. Guy was a merlin and a druid or magus, specifically a bard of
the golden bough who descended to Hades, by classical Greek
description and definition, and as stated, he would have been a
revealer (anschau) and binder of mysteries. As a "spell" master, a
binder and loosener of lives, a male Fata or Mori, one of the Fairy
Race.

The presence of the cult in Brittany, suggests that the Anjou or
Ankou, as the otherworld kingdom of the dead, was moved as a rite,
from northern Pictavia to southern Pictavia in Gaul where it gave
its name to a region which then became its cultic kingdom, years
before either Morgana or Melusine were born.

It is more likely therefore that Emrys II - Ambrosius Aurelius -
introduced the cult to the region when he decamped to Brittany
sometime after the defeat of Rhydderch, which would then help to
explain Melusine’s later presence there.

She is said to have fled to Gaul from Northumbria with her Dragon
Court, after the ritual killing of her father in the same manner
that Morgana killed Merlin. (Elinus’ spirit was later deified, it
would seem, and given symbolic gift offerings of milk, after a
manner associated with the live "dragons" who were given the
semen
or "milk", and the blood of maidens; and were thought to inhabit
caves, or labyrinths, throughout Europe).

However it was unthinkable that a royal pictish princess would flee
and wander through someone else’s kingdom unannounced, as this could
be construed as an act of invasion and war. Such a story seems to be
a later justification of her presence there.

But as a priestess of the Ankou in Scottish Pictavia she would have
been welcome in the other land known as Pictavia, where her cousin
Rainfroi, the third great grandson of Ambrosius, reigned as the
Archdruid of the Golden Bough, the hereditary, ritual king of the
dead. As it is they, both patricides, were destined to marry, which
would strengthen the dynasty, and thus the migration was a planned
event. In any case the cult, with its ancient Irish associations
predates Vortigern, and we should be looking farther back still for
its origins.

Essentially the British-Gallic Cult of the Ankou, is related to a
symbol sacred to Horus’ supposed wife: Hathor-Venus, and to
Isis and Nephthys - the Ankh. These deities appear to be related to each
other in the same triple goddess configuration found in the rest of
Europe and the Levant. The draconian Ankou cult is a regional
variant therefore, perhaps the origin, of the Greek cult of
Persephone as described in the foregoing essay on the labyrinth.
(Isis and Nephthys are also both, amongst other things, goddesses of
the dead).

In the Funerary Cult of Egypt, the nobility employed Ka-Priests to
tend the dead. This is linked to a strong thread of ancestor
veneration which is also found in Scythian culture. Though the
Faiyum Labyrinth has long since been reclaimed by the sands, the
massive labyrinth complex of funerary palaces in the 25-26th dynasty
necropolis standing next to the temple of Hatshepsut in Deir
el-Bahari is still in existence. At the centre of the complex is
situated the sacred sanctuary which has an adjoining cell which is
commonly recognized as the utmost Holy of Holies, the singular
feature of which is the carved Ankh Cross which dominates its facing
wall.

In the ’Papyrus of Ani’ dated 1300bc, Isis and
Nephthys are depicted
as standing either side of the Ankh and holding aloft, above its
loop, the solar disc which relates to the Sephiroth of Kether, also
called the Ajna Chakra, symbolized by the ’thousand petalled lotus’.
This lotus in Egypt was associated with the psychotropic Nile Lily;
and the generic symbol of the lily in all its national variations,
was associated with the Grail and Dragon Families. The subject of
the lily will be studied in some detail later on.

In pre-christian Gaul it appears on the carved heads of chieftains
whose effigies were incorporated into architectural columns and at a
very early period Prior to its adoption by the committee of Paris, the
lily or ’Fleur de Lys’ (Fleur de Luce or Flower of Light; Flavia
Anderson) was the badge of the early Kingdom of Anjou. The shape of
the fleur de lys seems to have been influenced, in its present form,
by a very important Gallic magical rune which was within a group of
symbols derived from, or related to, the prototype of the Ankh.

The lines of the fleur de lys’ basic structure pass through two
planes and two angles to form a St Andrews Cross overlaid upon a
Greek Cross in the manner employed to create the Norse binding
runes. From the evolution of this figure it is thought that the Chirho was developed as a later form of the
Ankh.

This eight armed cross appears in the Canary islands cut into the
bottom of the bowl recesses which were carved into the top of stones
outside sacred caves, duplicating the concept of the cup and ring
stones one can find throughout Britain.

As was the case in the offerings made to Melusine’s father outside
the cave in Northumbria, in the Canary Islands milk was also poured
into these depressions and left to trickle away down the side of the
monolith. The eight armed figure was believed by the islanders to be
sacred to Isis, the virginal High Priestess of Waite’s alchemical
Tarot, and it was said to be her "milk", the dew of the fleur de lys
or rosicrucis, that flowed from the eight armed cross to form the
milky way, the spiral vortex or labyrinth of the "cosmic" dragon,
the Orouborus which features in the cross of the Dragon Court.

The fleur de lys itself is so configured as to contain within it
both the Ankh and the Chi Rho. The figure of the fleur de lys, as a
Gallic rune, comprises in the Norse of Nyd as +, an equal armed
cross meaning both need and death, Gifu as X meaning union and Wyn
as a loopless P meaning victory.

Translated, this forms the ritual process encapsulated in the rite
of the labyrinth. The P lost its loop during symbol migration, a
phenomenon documented by the Count d’Alviella in his book ’The
Migration of Symbols’, some components of which I will draw upon
later and reproduce the figures for.

In essence there are several related crosses that, although thought
to have developed from each other serially, belong to a very ancient
group of symbols employed within the royal Dragon culture within
which the rites associated with central mortuary theme of the cult
of the Ankou form an integral and timeless component which is well
known.

The Sacred An
The Chi Rho, is the symbol for the symbol for the Swan Knights, is
developed from the Ankh itself which in turn forms the basis for the
fleur de lys. In Melusine’s time the field of lilies, the arms of
Anjou, represented the Pictish virgin princesses coveted by other
dynasties, which are the lilies featured in the earlier Song of
Solomon.

These lilies or Anjous/Ankhous/Ankh maidens, sacred to the various
Goddesses mentioned herein, are the Bruidhinas, the
Morrigan/Valkyries and Swan princesses of the
Dragon Dynasty which
the Swan Knights were sworn to protect. Their symbol IS the
Chi Rho
Ankh which, instead of just representing the XP, the first letters
of the name of Christ the Man, latterly conceals the true nature and
gender of the Christos itself, which is of the rtu of the
Ankh, the
Goddess.

Consequently the Chi Rho itself is a female Dragon symbol related to
both Morgana and Melusine, as well as all the other
Ladies of the
Lake, mermaids, naiads, nixes, virgin priestesses and so forth. The
earlier history of the Chi Rho, the Ankh and the
Haegl rune which
forms the fleur de lys can be found in the development of
Mesopotamian cuneiform from earlier Sumerian pictograms.

In Sumerian the symbol represents ’An’ : The Star. The star
pictogram later became cuneiform with the wedges forming the ends of
the top branch or ray, and the subsequent three rays going down the
left hand flank of the glyph. At this stage the symbol came to
represent the ’Heavens’ and its final cuneiform representation was
as an equal armed cross with a wedge at the end of the top ray and
two wedges on the left arm which represented the gods. This figure
is close to variant representations of the Ankh in medieval black
magic where the top arm is an enlarged triangle whilst the other
arms have smaller wedge ends.

The common translation of the word Christ is "anointed one".
Libatio, from the root libare, meaning ’to taste’,
’to pour’ (as
Mary of Bethany is said to have anointed Christ) is however, closely
related to this concept. Libare is related to the Greek leibein, to
pour, drop by drop, translated as ’to pour out (wine etc.) in honour
of a god’ OED.

Wine is not uniquely specified, but any liquid; meaning that Libare
and Libatio are not solely confined to the act of the
libation of wine to a god. It has been suggested that some Greeks
would argue that ’Christos’ meant gold and that would then intimate that the
idea of anointing, in relation to the Grail, was derivative and
attributive.

In the Greek Orthodox Bible Christ is described as the ’Golden One’
from crusos - Crusos - Gold; rather than cristosCristos - To
anoint. Here we are back to Christ as the ’red-gold’
flow, an
anointing or libationof virgin blood of the Labrus or
Labia. Libare
is also related to Liber or Bacchus the god of "wine" and here we
are reminded of the later christian doctrine of transubstantiation
and their substitute of wine for blood.

In Mithraism the blood of the bull was poured from above onto the
supplicants as an anointing chrism and a libatory eucharist drink,
and so the idea of libation solely being TO a god is incorrect, as
often the gods, or indeed the goddesses’ blood, was shed as both an
anointing and libation for their flock. Further on we will encounter
’anointing’ not as Christos, but as murizein - murizein which has
its own surprises.

Jesus’ surname is ben Panther, meaning the
Leopard, which is the
totem steed of both Bacchus and Diana and is repeated in the arms of
the House of Plantagenet as three (originally one) heraldic leopards
’Or’ on a field ’Gules’ or three golden leopards on a field of
blood. The archaic spelling for Leopard is Libard and this night
stalking animal is renowned for drinking the blood of its victims
prior to eviscerating and consuming the carcass. Here again is a
variant of the word Libare and quite a pertinent one at that, as
again blood becomes a Libation associated with Christthe son of the Libard, as the anointed anointer, the
libater, the initiator.

Christianity is substantively a prime example of the reversal of
libation and in this it attempts to mimic earlier Bacchanalian
ritual. Royal anointingin post Carolingian christian ritual, where
the oil of the chrism (representing the Holy Spirit) and the vatican’s right to use it to create kings from peasants and
merchants, also by transubstantiation one assumes, is treated as
though it were delivered in obedience to the will of God by proxy
through his chosen priesthood, who intended it to take the place of
royal blood in the veins.

It is suspected that the etymology of the name Christ was tampered
with in order to accommodate this anointing ritual and to derive the
usurped social power that attends upon it. Along with the service of
communion this is another catholic version of reverse libation with
blessings being showered upon the grateful by a beneficent
priesthood.

Libare is related, via ’to taste’, to labia - lips and
libant means
’tasting’ or ’touching lightly’, obviously with the lips. Related to
Libare we will remember Bacchus and Liber; as the tree to which he
was crucified and which gave blood red wine that liberated the
spirit and taught it dark knowledge and ancient law. Lake or
Del Acqs, sometimes written as Lacrepresents the lily and the rose: The
Roman dye "Lac": The crimson flow, and Lac or
Lactose: The white
"milk" of the maidens. Within the cellular and genetic fabric of
these substances was retained the Ankh’a or Ka of the
An, the Holy
Spirit and power of the Dragon Gods - the ka of the
An: The soul of
the Heavens.

The crimson flow and the ’milk and honey’ (Nectar or
Ambrosia; cf.
the name of three generations of Merlins above) of the priestesses
can be adequately and correctly described as their sacrificial
libation, the "blood of the Christos" shed for the remission of
sins
(Hebrew: ’Sin’ - "falling short of the mark"; perceptual blindness,
the living death).

The spurting of "milk" relates to La Fontaine de Soif, so called
because it "sprays out", like a fountain, from the cubic
stone. This
symbolism is derived from the ejaculatory propensity of the
Graffenberg gland which ejects its seminal fluid, the sacred
’milk
and honey’ or nectar, like a jet.

Poured onto the Ankh figure in the cup stone by the sacred cave or
labyrinth, the substitute milk of Isis is not symbolic breast milk
but an allegory for her seminal fluid, inundating the symbolic
vulva, the Ankh, from whence it originates. It should also be noted,
however, that breast milk itself contains Telomerase, a sort of
bicycle puncture repair kit for infant DNA. One is supposed to see a
connection here, I think.

The Ankou cult and the ancient form of the Ankh is therefore
associated with caves and thus labyrinths and with the holy female
essence. Both Morgana and Melusine of Anjou or
Ankhou are closely
associated with such elements, as High Priestesses and ritual
representatives, in a line of succession which goes back through the
Pictish Fairy Princesses or swan Maidens, beyond Sobekhnefru and the
Egyptian Ankh Goddesses to the Sumerians and Babylonians, whose
goddesses Ast (Isis) Nebt-Hat (Nephthys),
Nin-Kursag (Hat-Hor) and
Lilith, from whom Melusine, Morgana and the
Ladies of the Lake are
descended, all bear the W symbol which forms the loop of the Ankh,
which was first entrusted to the god Thoth, who was the Sumerian
Nin.Gish.Zi.Da:The Lord of the Artifact of Life, son of
Enki and
Eresh Kigal (Persephone-Demeter).

Likewise Magdalene, the daughter of the Jireh Priest of the Temple
of Jerusalem was a Priestess of this lineage and the matriarch of
the Ankh Priestesses in Albany. Known as a Scarlet woman, she was
so-called because of the colour of the Lac-dyed ceremonial robes she
wore as a senior officiate, the blood tincture indicating her ritual
obligation.

The term Scarlet Woman became associated with prostitutes because
Magdalene, as a temple priestess, in her relationship to Jesus as a
Pharaonic, Dragon Messiah or God-King, fulfilled the role of the
goddess Hathor or the Judaic Astaroth, the
Sabbath or Matronit in
the esoteric, Kabalistic aspects of Jewish spiritual philosophy.

This role involved her in forms of ritual "congress" or Enthea, of
the type specified in the Song of Solomon, which are also found in
the Tantric Kaula Vama Marg and repeated later by the Avallonese
Virgins of the Holy Blood.

Astaroth was the Goddess of the Shekinah, the divine presence of The
Eternal within the Solomonic Temple of Jerusalem. To the early
Gnostics she was recorded as representing the Sophia or
Holy Spirit,
the (feminine) principle of Divine Wisdom. Later Astaroth (a denizen
of the Devil in the medieval demonologies) continued to be
recognized by the Cathar christians as a symbol of the
Holy Spirit
and during Jesus’ life, Astaroth was therefore manifest in the
person of Magdalene as Christ’s consort in accordance with
Apocryphal doctrines, in much the same way that Ishtar,
Matronit and
Lilith, as early priestesses of the Shekinah began as the consorts
of Enki, Enlil, the Dragon God-Kings and later
Jehovah.

In this Mary too, fulfilled the role of the Anunnaki blood mothers
who fed the Dragon God-Kings. As the physical embodiment of
Astaroth, the Sophia or Shekinah, within the
Egyptian Therapeutate
she was Hathor-Venus, whose cross derived from the Ankh, and as
Ishtar, the morning and evening star, she personified "war" in the
mornings (Seratonin) and "love" in the evenings (Melatonin).

After Ishtar’s example the progeny of the Anunnaki dynasty, the
Rephaim or Angels, who became the Elven,
Dragon Maidens and Knights
of Albany, Eire and Gaul, fulfilled two roles, that of destroyers
and reapers, and that of divine lovers and healers.

Under the patronage of Ishtar or her mother - Hathor (Nin-Kursag) of
the Ankh or Ankhou, (and later, under two of the principal Astaroth
matriarchs, Magdalene of the Green Dress and Anna, her grand
daughter, who migrated to Albany and married into the collateral Pendragon dynasty), the RephaimofPictavia and Eire, were both the
Swan Princesses; vessels of the benedicta viriditas, and the
Morganas and Valkyries, the Priestesses of the Ankou and the
Guardians of the cult of Blood and Death.

In this way the Cult of the Ankhou gained a collateral line which
descended through the posterity of the Druidic families to the
Mistletoe Bards and Priestesses. From the ’Letter to Ceretius’ we
know that Jesus performed a sacred role as the central figure within
the circle dances that, in conjunction with his secret teachings and
his rituals of initiation (Morton Smith), he conducted at night.

In the ’Letter’ Jesus is recorded as saying at one
nighttime
gathering "The Eight Are With Us". These are the Egyptian Ogdoad or
eight Great Spirits of Gnosticism which are also found in Taoism.
The Eight Spirits are the second wave of creators (after the
Cosmic
Twins) that appeared tilling on the sacred mountain of the "rising
land" that emerged after the flood.

They appear in an illustration in the ’Book of the Dead’ of
Khensumose: Third Intermediate Period, 21st dynasty circa 1075 - 945
bce. Evidence for the existence of this belief prior to the
pre-Ptolomeic period is derived from its worship site at Hermopolis
whose ’Eight Town’ quarter existed at the time of the Fifth Dynasty:
2498 - 2345 bce.

’The Eight’ when reflected upon in relation to Ubaid or
Sumerian
tradition represent the Anunnaki, the original gods of Egypt
salvaging the remains of their civilization after the Black Sea
inundation. The story has been transposed to Egypt, like so many
stories travel with their tribes, and becomes the creation myth of
the pharaohs.

The Ogdoad, also found in China as we have noted, are some of the
sons and daughters of Enki-Samael (Ptah) and Ninkhursag (Hat-Hor).
Enki sired Ningal from Ninkhursag, and Eresh Kigal from
Ningal, it
would appear. Eresh Kigal, mother of Lilith, gave birth to eight
deities - Abu, Nintulla, Ninsutu, Ninkashi, Nazi, Azimua, Nintu and
Enshag; (Sitchin). That
Jesus, as an initiate, invokes them,
suggests that he had a firm Egyptian, gnostic ritual background
which has its origins in Dragon kingship, manifesting itself later
in medieval witchcraft.

This reinforces and supports an argument for the role of Jesus’
wife
as his Priestess of Hathor-Astaroth and points to her lineage
becoming a contributive bloodline to the pre-existent cult of the Ankou in Albany and Pictavia.

It is significant that the Ogdoad are also known in Scandinavia,
where they are called the Aia. The Norse have a diagram of the
sacred mound as a square which also shows the compass points and the
migration of the eight tribes of the Gods from the Holy Mountain.
Professor Douglas Adams of Idaho University has demonstrated that
the i or y may be substituted by an s as in Arsi-Cantu becoming Aryi-Cantu, which would give us
Aia as Asa and thus Aesir and Aes
Dan or Aes d’An (Arya of Anu).

This is of some interest because people are used to having the
Anunnaki presented as a small council of deities, when in fact
they
were a race of people who were still known as the Anukim in
Canaan
in 1200 bce, 760 years after Enlil’s Anunnaki court had apparently
fled Babylon in 1960 bce. Corroborating the Migration myths of the
Danaan in the Irish Liebhar Gabhala, the Aia migration glyph
suggests that eventually at least one of the tribes of the Anunnaki
settled in the north, whilst another, the Danaan, headed west
following "a flood".

The location of the sacred mound would then seem not necessarily to
have been Egypt but, given the broad dispersal of the Ogdoad story,
it would probably have been a site from where the gods originally
migrated, the most obvious location of which is Aryan Scythia,
near
the Black Sea region. It is quite possible that the time frame for
this migration was 4000 bce, when the Bosphorus collapsed and the
Ubaid fled south to Sumeria. Later they became the gods of Egypt and
it is feasible that the story of the "tilling of the sacred mound"
migrated there with the Anunnaki - Ubaid deities.

Venal or Venal?The druids welcomed the Culdee into Britain as brothers in spirit
and fellow druids. Columba called Jesus a Druid ( of the order of
Magi) and the links between primal christianity and druidism are
quite apparent. Jesus, (a harrower of hell like Orpheus-Bacchus)
Odin and Theseus were born in caves and, like Merlin and
Elinus,
Jesus was buried in one, in a garden which was arguably a Necromaniton, or
druidic sacred grove with a funerary cell. Mary
Magdalene was initiated into the Egyptian Therapeutate by
Jesus.

She was twelve at the time and he was, according to the Bible, about
thirty years old. The ritual employed was similar to that in which
Lazarus partook, in that it involved symbolic death and
resurrection. See Luke 8: vs 41- 56. Following her initiation and
during the period of her early adolescence, as was common practice,
Mary would have acted as Jesus’ handmaiden or grail priestess.

Botticelli’s ’Birth of Venus’ is described by Graham-Dixon as an
analogy of the Virgin Mary. In the depiction of the red-haired Venus
however, there is a supposed sexual analogy represented in the
various folds of fabric and hair which are arranged by the painter
to suggest the vulva which remains covered by her modesty. It isn’t
likely that the darling of the Roman Church would have been depicted
in this manner. Botticelli wouldn’t have got away with it in a
period when Gallileo was being threatened with death for suggesting
that the earth was an orbiting sphere. One could do virtually
anything with the Magdalene however.

Common sense would, in any case, suggest that the Mary depicted was
in fact the Magdalene and that the painting was a deliberate though
esoteric attempt to record what was commonly known about her race,
her position and her function, amongst alchemists and Rosicrucians
during the Renaissance period. The suggestive folds were made in red
cloth festooned with flowers and here we might have an intimation of
the spiritual fertility of the vulva in menstruus.

Inasmuch as commentators have stated that Magdalene was a sacred
prostitute or priestess of Ishtar (daughter of Hathor), this can be
explained by this particular phase of her spiritual life where a
certain type of congress, a secret outside the Cult, would have led
to her being suspected of being a prostitute in some orthodox Jewish
opinion, not being at the time married. It is very probable however,
that the so-called rites of Venus she ritually engaged in with the
Messiah have been confused with other definitions of the word venal,
which pertains not only to sex, but to payment for any service or
goods.

The confusion between the words Venus and Venal has led to the error
where it was thought that Magdalene was a prostitute, who was "paid"
for "Venal" services. In the Egyptian tradition of
Jesus’ ancestor
Solomon however, Mary - a priestess of the rites of Hathor within
the Egyptian Therapeutate - would, like Sheba, have been a young
Shunnamite, a donor of womb blood and the ’Water of Life’, a
Lily of
the Valley and a Rose of Sharon.

After Jesus death, Magdalene went to the cell and found it open.
Rather, I would argue that in accordance with the traditional ritual
that accompanied her station, she was expected to stay in the cell
and commune with the Ka of Jesus in the underworld.

Few people actually knew the real reason why she went and the reason
people might have assumed would have been expected of a Priestess of
an Egyptian Cult. In Celtic countries and in Egypt this was common
practice, as in the cases where it has been demonstrated that tombs
had living quarters in them.

That she went to heal him of his non fatal wounds was a secret known
only to an initiated few, in whose number the apostles, it seems,
were not counted. In any case she was the first to "see" him, and in
this she fulfils precisely the role of the Sibyl or shamanka, the
druidess of Cumae, Medea of the Golden Fleece,
Ariadne, and numerous
other females, including the witch of Endor.

In Revelation 22: v.16

Jesus, clothed as a
Repha’im proclaims himself the Root and Branch
of David, the Bright and Morning Star.

Amongst other things, including being the
Priest-King of Lucifer,
Jesus also proclaims himself as a High Priest of Hathor, who is the
mother of Ishtar, Astaroth, Shekinah, Sophia and
Venus, the Star of
the Morning. It becomes increasingly difficult to see Mary Magdalene
therefore as anything less than a central character in a collateral
druidic cult of the dead, a priestess of the Ankou of Ishtar.

In such a capacity, as with the various cave dwelling shamankas in
mythology, she would have acted in a twofold role both as a
visionary and also as a guide and companion, a facilitator whose
blood allowed access to the underworld or Cosmic Consciousness.

Her essence and elan was the Dergflaith of sovereignty, the
pomegranate wine of Persephone that gained the Bard of the Golden
Bough, the Hero of Mythology, entrance to the land of Elphame, the
Kingdom of Ankou. In this ritual capacity, Morgana, Melusine and La
Filles du Lac et la Fonteine; followed her example and demonstrated
a lineal descent as living goddesses, from at least one of the Ankh
cults of antiquity.

In the bible the narrator says that a sword will separate the quick
from the dead. The sword is the Spirit and the spirit, as we have
seen, is also symbolized by the tongue, and by fire. In Latin a
sword sheath is called a vaginum. It is the use of the "sword" which
separates the quick, the living spirits; (the Elves), from the dead
or the dead in life. In other words it is the rite of the Maiden,
the "christos of salvation" that gives life.

References to the Sword as the Holy Spirit in the bible include
Revelations 1: v.16

"Out of his mouth went a sharp, two edged
sword....in his hand he held Seven Stars", said to represent the
seven churches of Asia

(It is interesting to note the association
here between Bacchus and the Pleiades).

In John of Patmos’ vision,
the Alpha and Omega figure: Jesus, is dressed in the garb of an
Angel or Repha’im.

Hebrews 4: v.12 "The
’word’ (pneuma/spirit) of
God is a two edged sword".

Ephesians 6: v.17 "Take the helmet of
salvation and the Sword of the Spirit".

The story of the pentecost relates that the Holy Spirit descended
upon the disciples like "tongues of fire" and this is a symbol
which, connected to the foregoing, is especially relevant in
relation to the Dragon, whose fiery breath is a symbol of the
Holy
Spirit, the "Word" of God, the
Torah; or the Law of Destiny
determining the progress of mankind’s fate.

The sword is an Ankh symbol with the blade representing the tongue,
the guard represents the grail dish or womb, the spiraled grip
symbolizes the spinal column and the pommel (from Fr. la Pomme, the
little apple) represents the pineal and its chakra.

In the medieval Grimoire ’The Clavicula Salomanis’ the guard of the
magical sword is constructed of two crescent moons back to back. The
sheathed sword symbolizing Peace, represents hierogamy and balance,
oneness and union.

The story of Arthur and the Sword in the Stone is translated by some
to mean that Arthur became king because he knew how to extract iron
from stone. As smithing was a part of alchemy and thus a kings
science, it followed for some scholars that in order to become king,
Arthur would need to convince people that he knew where iron came
from.

The iron age had been extant for over a thousand years before the
druids thought this story up. In a pre-industrialized society that
depended on iron for everything and where nearly every moderately
sized village had a smithy, Arthur would have already known how to
extract iron from rocks and other people would have known that
Arthur knew. The age of secret metal magic had long since passed by
his time.

The Sword-Stone tale operates on two levels of organic, not
metallurgic, alchemy and refers to the enthea resulting in
transcendence, resulting in sovereignty. The stone is both the cubic
stone of the Ankh Goddess- Priestess and the Lia Fail, the stone of
destiny, a representative symbol of the macrocosmic cubic stone of
the Earth as the anthropomorphized Goddess of Sovereignty.

The sword is both the tongue in the first instance and the Sword
symbol of derivative integrity, cosmic consciousness and resultant
personal sovereignty in the second. From such personal sovereignty
comes the wisdom and creativity to administer the sovereignty of the
nation, thus qualifying Arthur to be a king.

That he fluffed the job in the end is another matter. Even Goddesses
have off days. They’re only human after all. The sword in the stone
says that sovereignty rises from the womb of the Grail Maiden, the
virgin Dragon Princess.

The Sword as Tongue implies the method by which sovereignty is
obtained. Elsewhere the pendant T bar of the Ankh glyph corresponds
to Tau, the Law and more precisely, the utterer of the Law, the
Hindu Lingham or in Hebrew, the tongue of the Repha’im, the
fairy Bruidhe Bard in Gaelic, whose spells, or words of cosmic law, bound
men’s fate and, like the Morrighan warrior or valkyrie, represented
the Holy Spirit.

In the foregoing examples the symbolism sometimes tends to overlap
because of the adaptation of the glyphs over the passing centuries.
Pure symbols like the ankh naturally evolve to become more complex
with the addition of other components, whilst still retaining the
originals, which can double up sometimes, as in the case of the
addition of the T to the W. On its own the
T is already the lingham
and yoni combined. Add this to the W as the womb, and the symbol
becomes reinforced, as in the following breakdown.

To qualify the T component we have to separate this symbol into two
parts. Being specific, the upright corresponds to the tongue as utterer whilst the crossbar, anciently dish-shaped like the new
moon, represents the womb or uterus, also the utterer.

The Tau was given to the priest-king by the womb. He passed it on as
spells or laws, with the tongue which drank the wisdom of the cosmic
law from that womb. The cup/dish and stone, the moon or womb and
pineal in this instance; being held by a statue of Melchizadec, is
situated outside the door of Chartres Cathedral, along with a figure
of the Magdalene, which comes as no surprise.

The Tau symbol can be found in Scandinavia associated with
Tir, the
God of Law and Judgment whose rune became in this century, the
familiar crow’s foot or upright arrow. The Tir mark was specifically
the property of the king whose word was binding on all and so the
Tau or Tir element of the Ankh is, like the
Omega from which it
feeds, a royal symbol, intimating again the holy- sacral nature of
the Grail ritual.

The symbol of the Chi Rho of these swan princesses, as a derivative,
later form of the Ankh, was known before Christ Jesus’ lifetime, as
was the IHSof Bacchus, whose story is connected here via the
Ankh
Cross as a crucifix.